


Blunt the Knives

by orphan_account



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Malicious dwarf OCs, Mutilation, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:01:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo isn’t strong, fast or particularly agile – no hobbits are, not like dwarves or elves. He hurts easily and heals slowly. This is why words tend to be his weapon of choice.</p><p>Words have failed him today, more than the sword ever has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blunt the Knives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the kink meme, here: http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/5346.html?thread=11128290#t11128290
> 
> Open to concrit! Thank you.

Bilbo isn’t strong, fast or particularly agile – no hobbits are, not like dwarves or elves. He hurts easily and heals slowly. This is why words tend to be his weapon of choice. 

Words have failed him today, more than the sword ever has.

The hands that hold him down are strong and large; pushing them away is like trying to push away a stone wall. The floor is cold against his back and there is a roar in Bilbo’s ears as his mind blanks in uncomprehending terror.

He has been wary of dwarves before. He has even been afraid of their actions. He has never been afraid of them. Not until now.

“I’ll teach you to lie about the king,” one of the dwarves says, voice ugly with anger, drink and hate, his folded knees holding Bilbo’s head tight and immobile. Bilbo cannot see anything other than the needle he has, curved like a fishhook and fat, hideously sharp. It’s laced with a thick black thread.

“I didn’t – I didn’t –“ is all Bilbo can manage, stuttering uselessly as his body cannot twist and pull away from the second dwarf, who holds down his arms and legs with cruel effortlessness. “Please no don’t –“

Bilbo is silenced with a fist to his stomach, strong enough to bring tears to his eyes. His breath whistles fast when it recovers and a hand grips his chin, pulling it up.

“As if the king would dirty himself on a little whore like you,” the dwarf says, and stabs the needle into the side of Bilbo’s mouth. It scratches across his teeth and with a bend of the wrist it cuts its way out, pulled through entirely, thread burning like fire under his skin.

The needle comes down again and this time, when it stabs up, it does so on the other side of his mouth. It pulls his open lips closed, agonising.

Blood runs into his mouth and he chokes on it.

The dwarf’s free hand pinches Bilbo’s lips together and he carries on with his work, ignoring the crying, stuttering breath that is the noise Bilbo can no longer release. His mouth is drowned with blood, coating his tongue and teeth, congealing with sticky phlegm in the back of his throat. He swallows and chokes as it burns up his nose. He can barely breathe. His eyes are tight shut and crying.

The needle causes pain sharp enough to blind. It is worse when the needle is out and the thread is tugged through, scraping, pulling. He wants to open his mouth, the sheer need to breathe and scream tearing around his head, but he can’t. Not without fresh agony, not with the thread sewing him shut.

It feels like it takes an age. By the end he is reduced to an animal – a mute, bleeding thing, trapped by a strength far greater than its own, with no thoughts beyond fear and pain. He struggles and cries, again and again, and neither achieve anything.

They let him go when the thread is tied and the excess cut off, neat as if mending a torn garment. Bilbo cannot stand – his legs are shaky, they crumble beneath him. He crawls away instead and flinches as they laugh and spit at him.

In the hallway he stops and puts a hand to his mouth. His fingers find strong thread and he nearly throws up from the wrongness of it. The pain makes him move his lips which hurts him more, a vicious cycle that leaves his heart jumping and tears on his face. The feel of it inside him, pulling with every small movement, taut where it touches his teeth, his tongue – it is a violation.

His own room is not far away and when he closes the door behind him he has never been so pathetically glad that none saw him. But as he looks around, stone lit by the hearth and covered in tapestry, rug and wooden furniture brought in for him especially, Bilbo wishes desperately that he were not alone. He doesn’t know what to do to stop this pain. He is no healer.

Blood is warm and wet on his chin and inside his mouth. It drips on his shirt. His breath is ragged and too fast through his nose, not enough. It feels like he’s suffocating, helpless. Then Bilbo remembers Sting and he doesn’t even stop to consider what a bad idea it is – he only knows that he needs the thread gone and that he doesn’t care how.

He sits on the bed and brings Sting up to his face, parallel to his mouth. The first time he touches the thread the pain makes his hands slip and he cuts his chin, long and deep. More blood dripping, a smear on the blade. Bilbo doesn’t stop to calm his hands but tries again, desperate. He cuts his lip open and the thread snaps in one of the stitches but does not unravel, no less taut. He still can not open his mouth even the slightest.

His entire face feels alight with pain. He can barely see through his tears. He does hear the heavy knock at the door – even as he turns in panic he cannot make a sound, cannot stop the door swinging open after a second knock and long moment.

Thorin’s face breaks open in horror as he sees Bilbo. His mouth slack, dark eyes wide, he stands and stares. Bilbo is shaking and he realises distantly that he must look more than a mess: an outright horror, bloodied and mutilated. He is too relieved that it is not the two from before that he doesn’t even care.

When Thorin takes a violent step forwards Bilbo flinches, but Thorin doesn’t stop until he’s standing close enough to grip Bilbo’s shoulder in one hand and tilt his face up with the other. Thorin’s mouth is shut tight, a terrible, grim line, but his eyes are wild as he searches Bilbo’s face. Sting drops to the ground with a clatter.

“Who did this?” Thorin demands, and it’s such a patently ridiculous thing to say that Bilbo chokes a laugh, which turns into painful sobs, and suddenly he’s clinging to Thorin’s coat, crying wet, desperate tears. He tries to bury his face in Thorin’s broad chest because it hurts, worse than anything he’s felt before, it hurts so much, he hates it and wants it gone.

Thorin only stays for a bare few seconds before he breaks away and Bilbo is left stranded on the floor. He follows to the doorway and stops there, watches as Thorin all but break down the door just along and across the hallway. It is Bofur’s door, where he agreed to live because he saw how unsure Bilbo had been as the only hobbit amidst a kingdom of dwarves, and his heart is kind like that.

Bilbo doesn’t hear Bofur’s voice but he hears Thorin’s: “ _Be silent._ Get me a knife, a small one, sharp – a cloth, a bowl of water. Do it now. _Now!_ ”

There is the sound of something heavy smashing before Bofur shoots out of the room as fast as if he’d been thrown. He sees Bilbo, who isn’t quick enough to retreat back out of sight, and his face goes blank with understanding. Then he turns and runs.

Thorin is breathing hard as he appears in the hallway. He crowds Bilbo back into his room and shuts the door behind them. Then his expression cracks, raw and lost, and he puts his arms out to hold Bilbo's shoulders but does not pull him into his chest like he always does. It takes Bilbo a moment to realise that he doesn’t know how to hold him without causing new pain.

The hurt is terrible enough that some more matters little, and any comfort matters a lot: Bilbo stumbles the step forward and clings to Thorin, forehead pressing down into one shoulder. Thorin’s arms circle him and if their grip is too tight Bilbo doesn’t even notice.

They stand there like that for a long time, and while Thorin in an immovable shield of warmth and strength the damage is already done. It continues to hurt, to bleed, threatening to choke him and send him into a panic. Bilbo wants to shout and claw at his own face. He wants to pull the thread out even if it tears his lips to ribbons. He continues to cry; he feels exhausted and hysterical at the same time.

Thorin only moves when there is a knock at the door. He opens it – Bilbo turns his back, not wanting cheerful Bofur to see his face – and says: “Tell no one of this.” Then the door closes again and gentle hands guide Bilbo to the bed and sit him down on it. Thorin kneels on the floor in front of him, face carefully still. He has a soft cloth in one hand which he wets it in a bowl of water, wrings it out, and uses to wipe Bilbo’s chin.

It reveals the long cut there and the clotting blood within it. Thorin’s mouth tightens but he says nothing. His touch is softer than Bilbo can remember it ever being, though he still shivers from the stinging pain. It isn’t until the cloth touches his lips, however, that Bilbo flinches away, turning his head from the quiet ministrations.

He wants to say something, anything. He cannot.

Thorin tries again, and again Bilbo flinches away. He cannot stand the touch there, the pressure on the thread. There is a brief moment of stupid fear as Thorin looks at him and Bilbo thinks wildly that he will be held down if he keeps moving away. It ends when the cloth is put away and Thorin picks up the knife: a small thing, barely longer or wider than a finger.

He is so gentle, more so than Bilbo might have thought possible. As he sees the knife approach his face Bilbo closes his eyes anyway, not able to watch. His breath hitches as he feels it against the stitch on the furthest left, breaking it without touching the smallest amount of skin. The knife travels along his lips, Thorin’s broad fingers following its path, and cuts the thread stitch by stitch, both outside and inside of his mouth.

As soon as his mouth is free to open Bilbo opens it. He wants to say something to Thorin – a thank you, anything. Instead he bends double and spits out the blood and phlegm that had collected under his tongue and in the back of his throat. It hits the floor, a smear of mixed red and pink, frothy around the edges. The sight of it makes Bilbo gag and retch more and more up.

The thread had hurt the most being pulled tight and it hurt the most as it is taken out, section by small section. Bilbo shakes and says nothing, tries to make no noise at all, though he fails to silence his wet, uneven breaths.

“I swear I will never let anyone hurt you again,” Thorin says as the last of the thread is pulled out and he touches the skin around Bilbo’s ragged, torn lips. His voice is dark but safe, fervent. “I will punish those who did this to you.”

Bilbo pushes away Thorin’s hand and covers his mouth with his own two, shielding the still bleeding flesh from sight. His eyes are still closed – he doesn’t feel ready to open them.

Dwarves are good people but they are not always kind to strangers. Bilbo is still a stranger in these halls; in many ways he will always be one.

“If you wanted to – go back to Hobbiton –“ Thorin starts to say, his voice strange. This is even further from what Bilbo wants so he silences Thorin by leaning and bringing their heads together, cheek to cheek. Thorin’s beard tickles against his skin, still too sensitive. It is oddly calming, despite the bleeding he can feel start to wet his chin again. As they sit there Thorin's words only just start to register: go back to Hobbiton. The thought is strangely absurd.

Bilbo thinks of Thorin, of kind Bofur, of all of the others he’s come to love like family. He could leave for the Shire – he hasn’t even thought about it.

The words are still stuck in his throat, silent, but Thorin understands all the same.


End file.
